Whose Side is God on, Anyway?

 

Memorial Day is here again and I'm finding patriotic holidays increasingly uncomfortable.

There. I said it. 

It's not just because the U.S. becomes harder and harder to love (it does), but I'm starting to wonder whether it should even be an object of love and fealty at all.

The more I study this, I can't find a single place where God encourages love for country. Not one. 

He encourages us to obey our leaders (Hebrews 13:17) and to render unto our governments what rightly belongs to them (Matt 22:21) but beyond that, our commanded affiliation is to God and God alone. We are to love God first and then our neighbor. Period. 

We all know of conflicts in which both sides claim God's preference for them and that, of course, is impossible. He can love all men equally, but to prefer one side over another when they espouse opposite aims is not who He is. He loves the humans He made. All of them. And we are supposed to do that, too. 

If we're honest, though, we WANT God to be on our side of whatever conflict we're in. Who wouldn't? But at the same time, we also see the impossibility of opposing forces each allied exclusively with God. This is where philosophy comes in handy, because this is a logical contradiction. God cannot logically agree with both the invader and the invaded. A cannot equal not-A. God loves all combatants equally.

But what DOES God have to say about nations?

First, that He made them all (Acts 17:26) "From one man He made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth." God's nation is not defined by boundaries, but by His creation of them.

Then that He should and will be exalted among those nations (Ps 46:10) (Ps 86:9) (Is 60:3)

Also that no nation is righteous in itself but only insofar as it follows and worships God (Zech 2:11) "And many nations shall join themselves to the Lord in that day, and shall be my people." (Gen 22:18) "And in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice.”

A nation is not favored by God because of history, heritage, location, boundaries, language, declaration or constitution. It is holy simply when its people seek and worship Him and any allegiance is to be sworn to Him alone. In this, all people sharing that allegiance are one. 

God's nation is not the United States of America or any other humans gathered within a man-marked border. We are to have but one sworn identity and that to God, even Israel. When God said,

“For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth." -(Deut 7:6),  He began a work that would eventually encompass every single human being He made. 

"And the kingdom and the dominion and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High; his kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him." (Dan 7:27)

As for Memorial Day, my husband fought in the Vietnam War and his combat experience shortened his life by as much as 20 years. Dave never regretted his military service, but its greatest cost to him was not conscripting the years of his life, but putting him in situations that led him to doubt God's mercy and justice. It took him more than 40 years to recover from the scars this war left, but God sent grace enough so that he could again stand before Him with confidence. God and some bizarre national allegiance God might have was not responsible for the damage done. The country Dave fought for was responsible - the United States, the one whose flag we wave on Memorial Day, the one who we say is under God, the one to whom we swear allegiance without remembering all of its lies and errors. 

If a country is good, it is good because enough of its people pay attention to what God demands of each of them individually, not because of some restricted ideology that defines we are smarter, better, stronger, and more righteous than those humans who live 10 or 100 miles beyond a particular demarcation. 

                               (Dave around the time he worked undercover in Southeast Asia.

He burned his green beret in disgust)

The country Dave fought for betrayed him, plain and simple. It didn't act according to its precepts. All countries do this sooner or later. That's why God tells us to identify ourselves with Him, not with them. 

On this Memorial Day, I can honor those who acted according to what they thought was right by fighting and dying for their country, but I can no longer honor the country they fought for. It does not deserve it. 

Images: Dreamstime

Answering the Unanswerable: Why People of Faith Study Philosophy

 

I went back to school yesterday and was reminded of something important. I remembered why I went in the first place - to make sense of things. 

This is what the whiteboard looked like at the end of class.  Let me translate.

We were studying Kierkegaard, an angst-ridden Dane who had some of the same questions I did. Can God exist (in  philosophical terms, He can't - more later) and what in the world are we doing when we look for Him? Can He be found? And if He can, what does He look like?

Yes, this actually happened in a public university classroom and nobody cast aspersions. Nobody walked out. Nobody even objected. In fact, this is probably the only place anyone can ask these kinds of questions anymore. You can't ask them in church. Try it sometime. I have, and what we get is a combination of outrage and deer-in-the-headlights. Here, in school, when taught by a person of faith, we can arrive together at reasonable, thoughtful answers that can provide a platform for actual living.

So what does this mean? It started with whether God can exist. In philosophical terms, He can't because existence includes some kind of material presence. A pure spirit does not have that kind of existence.  And that's OK. That doesn't make God less God. In fact, it accommodates exactly what He claims to be. More than this world. Not made of a thing of any kind. 

And then there is telos. This is one of Aristotle's terms used to describe the final or highest cause of a person or action, the highest good of any living being, a fully realized consciousness, even the state of ultimate happiness. In short, Absolute Telos is the philosophical description of God. See the words underneath? These are the words philosophers have used to describe God. Highest Good, Transcendent, Unconditional, Impossible. All words for God. 

Why do we need these words? Because the best religion can do is vague references to God as being beyond understanding, or moving in mysterious ways. Blah. That doesn't help. Philosophical descriptions provide more - a starting point for understanding just what is the difference between God and everything else in our spiritual experience. They don't just paint a foggy picture. They establish a baseline, one we can expand on.

The expansion comes with the list to the right on the board, the list of relative telos. You see, in philosophy, states are separated into absolutes, those things that exist independently of anything else, and relative, those things whose definition depends on something else. In this case, God is an absolute telos, but our lives are lived primarily through relative ones. A relative telos might be the good that comes from careful parenting, or studying to graduate, or stopping at red lights, or putting your shopping cart back at the grocery. It is a goal we recognize as working toward accomplishing personal peace or social justice. 

The thing about relative telos, though, is that we usually do them (if we think about it at all, which philosophers do) to get beyond them. We don't just want to graduate, we want to have an ultimately satisfying life. We don't just want to be good parents, we ultimately want to do our part in making the world a better place for everyone. We engage in relative telos to achieve whatever of absolute telos we can muster. We do good in this world to find whatever we can of God. 

And this was Dr. Magnusson's last powerpoint slide, the point to which he built the lecture, which was to remind us of the goal we all want. 

Some people simplisticly call it heaven, but the philosophical idea of heaven is exactly how Sunday school might define it using different words. In Sunday school, Heaven is some undefined place up there where we are completely with God. In philosophy, the same state is found as we progress through relative telos, always with our eye on the absolute, when our orientation changes us every time we find a piece of that absolute, until we find we can "live in the finite, but not have our roots in it." 

This is where we find heaven, but not some pie in the sky we get after we die, a heaven available whenever we have the focus and faith to reach for it. 

That's why people of faith study philosophy. 

Bookends - Looking at the Big Picture

 Define miracle.

Go ahead. What event or series of events qualifies as a miracle?

Google thinks it's an extraordinary event that defies natural law and is often attributed to divine intervention. 

That's a pretty good definition, I think. The world chugs along, after all, according to specific and understood rules, ones that bear equations and formulas that are provable and repeatable. This is a good thing. It helps us maneuver through life. Even if we didn't make the rules, at least we can predict them. A dropped rock, for instance, will always fall down, not up or sideways, on planet Earth. An action causes an equal and opposite reaction. Energy is not created or destroyed. But you know all this.

Jesus, however, got famous partially for breaking these rules and we call these instances his miracles. He healed people who just touched his clothes. He brought dead people to life. He made food appear from nowhere. It's interesting, though, to consider the first and last of his miracles - the miraculous bookends in his manipulation of physics.

You probably easily remember the first - the changing of water to wine at a wedding feast. As his miracles go, this was a pretty innocuous one. No one was spectacularly cured or brought to life or magically fed. It was just a favor he did for a friend of his mom's.

But fast forward three years and move the venue from a party to an upper room, from public frivolity to a hideout. There's a cup in front of Jesus that is already full of wine and what does he do with it? He declares it to be his own blood. Not actual blood, mind you. It still smells and tastes like wine. But the declaration broke a law nonetheless - not a material law this time, but a supernatural one. 

At this point in his human experience, everything is escalating. The Cana incident at the wedding was easy to understand for anyone there who knew what was going on. In this world, water cannot spontaneously become wine. It defied physics. But the second incident involved much more. The wine in that case became blood not in the natural realm but in the supernatural one. It no longer nourished the body but it fed the soul. Each result was appropriate to its need. The wedding guests had something proper to drink and the disciples, who shared the cup of consecrated blood, had something of their teacher that was uniquely their own and would sustain them over and over until they, too died.

In many ways, these two incidents, the first and the last transformations Jesus enacted during his human life, became perfect bookends - the second as the completion of the first, almost as if he'd planned it that way from the beginning.

Oh, yeah. He did.

Images: How Stuff Works, Etsy

Made for Each Other

 

What is more important? The spirit put into me by God's hand in creation or the body with which He surrounded it in specific intent? Surely they were meant to live together, one  not necessarily superior to the other except as pertains to longevity. The spirit lives both before and will live after the body but, while they cohabit, they can both be used for the glory of God, since He both conceived of and created them both. Reaching for God and finding Him glorifies what He put in the spirit. Using the body in charity, in communion, in profitable physical labor and in giving and receiving love fulfills what it was made for.  

The body, contrary to what so many religions teach, is neither corrupt nor despicable unless it is used for a corrupt purpose. A life of destruction will destroy it. A life of looking for God, of searching out the connection between body and spirit, elevates both of them and God. Things to seek out - 

To see and be seen:

Comprehend that the world is the vehicle we are given as a mirror for us to find God at whom I cannot directly gaze but who in reflection will find my own face.

To hear and be heard:

Harmonica and violin, birdsong and baby's cry, the sigh of final breath and triumphant hallelujah. The sound of my own careful breath against velvet silence.

To taste and be tasted:

My tongue on sharp lemons and plump chocolates. A lover's tongue on my own salt and musk. The holiness of blessed bread and sacred wine. God with us.

Body and spirit. While the body lives, they can't be separated. At the end, though, God peels them carefully apart, leaving only what is most like Him, spirit made moreso by how the body has increased it while it lived. 

See me, feel me, touch me, heal me.

Holy body, holy spirit.

Made for each other.

Images: Spirit of Man - Christ, shutterstock

Not Just the Two of Us

 

"The exchange of love is illegitimate if consent on both sides does not come from that central point in the soul where YES can only be eternal. - Simone Weil

A friend of mine makes bets at weddings regarding how long the marriage he is witnessing will last. It's harsh of course, but chilling and pragmatic also. After all, we all know the statistics. Half of marriages end in divorce. My own history bears that out. I've been married twice. One ended in divorce and the other survived until death.

The one that didn't last was not founded on love of any kind, but on appearance and convenience. It never had a real chance to succeed. The second was founded on love, but not the kind Weil was talking about. The love was carnal, not eternal. At least not at first. The marriage managed to last because part way through, we adopted a new focus. Part way through, we decided to put God front and center - to follow Him and trust Him to bring us together in common purpose and He did. I daresay that marriage, too, would have ended in divorce otherwise.

It's no wonder that Weil's quote hits home. There's only one way to have a love founded on the eternal because God is the onlly eternal entity to whom we have regular access. 

The sad truth is that two humans have a hard job of it to love one another properly because, well, they're human. Weak sometimes. Fallible often. Well meaning, perhaps, but hurtful anyway. We are not to be totally depended on. Ever. 

Two people holding hands and walking into the sunset or staring into one another's eyes with love and longing are little equipped by one another's weakness to manage a satisfying, long-lasting union. But two people side by side following God are. Now that's a marriage that can last. A marriage, or a friendship, or a partnership of any kind can last only if it is supported by the eternal.

Image: Pinterest

Who Wants to Hear the Truth, Anyway?

 

I'm re-reading Atlas Shrugged, a 1000+ page novel written by philosopher Ayn Rand in 1957. It's a startling book I first read during my first year of college in 1970 and it changed my way of looking at the world and the way we live in it. Rand describes what fear and disconnection do to human beings and ultimately their society, destroying both their joy of achievement and their respect for morality. She's been generally despised for unveiling this world and how it operates but I didn't realize until now, more than 50 years later, that I've been living in the world she predicted the whole time.

Rand describes a world in which neither innovation for ambition has value, where a person's ability to think clearly, take responsibility, and act on those thoughts has no place, but where following orders, even questionable ones, is the only way forward. Around 1977, I had a job as a purchasing agent in a small plastics company near OHare airport and I had an idea to combine and change purchasing patterns to save money and enhance reliability. My boss, the owner's plodding son, told me I was not paid to think, but was paid to do as I was told. He used Rand's exact language and just like Rand's characters did, I quit that job.

Rand also describes a world in which the appearance of a thing is more important than the fact of it and that the players in the resulting schemes collude to cover up injustice. I remember when, as Vice President of a small steel company in the 1980s, I was told to obtain a price increase from our best customer when the conditions contractually allowing that increase, an increase in the price of steel, had not been met. I was expected to take a falsified invoice to the customer and I refused to do it. My employer was upset, of course, but not because I questioned their methods. Their only demand was whether I was declaring myself better or more virtuous than they. They never considered whether what they were asking could be honorably done (it couldn't). They just wanted to know if it was presentable. In the end, after my refusal, someone else did the deed and I learned that all involved on both sides of the table were aware of the subterfuge and knew the supposed negotiations to be a false mockery, a cooperation of farce. I quit that job, too.

Rand further describes a world where government regulations strangle creativity and productivity and in which people work ever harder and realize less benefit for either producer or consumer, leading to the breakdown of supply systems and in the end, the society they are supposed to support. Last week's New Yorker profiled a Kentucky farmer stymied by government controls on crop prices while he watches food being shipped overseas to poor countries even as local family farmers struggle to exist in the financial framework their own government allows. The farmer predicted a world where family farms, the backbone of our food supply, no longer exist and the food supply cannot recover.

In 1970, I didn't expect, really, that any of Rand's predictions would come true but they are - in these few and many more - in instances where we watch the government perpetuate itself rather than acting in the interests of a vital, alive future.

Frankly, hardly anyone likes Ayn Rand. My philosophy classmates once booed me for saying I did, and I still disagree with her in many ways. But in these ways, at least, she has told the truth. Come to think of it, that might be why she is so unpopular. The truth is, too.

Image: Thoughtco

The Danger of Indecision OR: What's for Dinner (AGAIN)?

 

A friend of mine once reflected that no one ever told her that getting married meant having to decide what's for dinner every night for the rest of her life. And she was right. It's true. It's just a fact of life. We have to eat and when we share life with someone, that's a decision someone has to make. Every day. 

But that's not the problem. It's not the decsion itself - whether to get Chinese takeout or throw some burgers on the grill - it's the incessant necessity of making decisions to the point of wanting to flee.

Sometimes decisions are unrelenting, pressing in from all sides, demanding attention in the guise of work or responsibility to friends or community obligations. Decisions are what can transform an ordinary Wednesday afternoon, any Wednesday afternoon, into a long tunnel that makes you feel like coiling into a little ball and rolling yourself under the nearest couch with the dust bunnies and hiding.

It would be such a relief to just put one foot in front of another awhile and nothing else, just to leave the determining of fate to someone else, to release into an effortless few days without the insistent pressure of the next move.

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!!!!!!!!

Nope. No can do.

And this is why:

The minute we lay down the responsibility of decision for our own life, we hand over the privilege to someone else and, unless that person is God, they are not up to the task. 

No one else knows what we want from life but us. No one else is capable of our conviction or purpose. No one else knows what we are or are not willing to sacrifice to achieve something. No one else understands who or what or how we love.

Oddly enough, it matters less which decisions we make than that we just make them. Almost all poor decisions can be redeemed in one way or another, but letting go of the reins we were meant to hold means that the horse is likely to run wild, out of control in the wrong direction.

One thing I know for sure is that, assuming the Matrix really is fiction, I live. I have been given a life and that life is a pure gift, meant to be LIVED. 

Life means something. It has a purpose and it is my joy and privilege to find mine. God gave me something very fine and I will, until it is taken away from me, show Him I love Him by directing and using my life rightly.

This is not done by accident. It is done by decision.

So decisions can be at their least, a pain, or at worst, dangerous, but bring 'em on. I won't get through unscathed, but that's all right. What I will do is use the life I'm given for the glory of Him who made it, bringing in the process satisfaction to us both. 

So, anyway, what IS for dinner tonight?

Images: Shutterstock, Adobe